Re: The Future


"Charles Hottel" <chottel@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote in message
news:_mUTh.2691$3P3.1491@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx

It is somewhat hard to answer your question and yet do the book justice.

I'll add the book to my "list of things to read". Meanwhile, I'll
throw out a few objections and questions, 'cause I too find this topic
interesting.


I will try to give the jist of why the process will keep going short of
our destroying ourselves or our being destroyed by a natural disaster.
Now that we have the human genome we will, at an ever increasing
exponential rate, decipher the processes underlying the operation of our
bodies and disease processes. This will allow us to conquer disease, end
hunger and extend life span.

I'm not sure how understanding human genome will "end hunger". Hunger
seems to be an economical and political problem, rather than a biological,
medical or technological problem. Even if by the means by which
genome-engineering will end hunger is by actually modifying our bodies so
that we no longer need to eat (and instead, absorb energy through
photosynthesis or something), the economical and political barriers will
still exist: i.e. we won't nescessarily share this technology with those
who are starving.

This will allow some of us to live long enough to take advantage of
nanotechnology which is now less developed than biotechnology, yet it
too is advancing exponentially. Nanotechnology will allow us to manifest
things in the real world from simple raw materials and the information
needed to construct them (picture Star Trek replicators machines).

There's a question of cost-effectiveness, though. It's one thing to
merely *have* the technology to take random matter (crumpled up
newspapers, banana peels, etc.) and convert it into something useful (e.g.
a dish of fettucini alfredo). It's an entirely different thing to have
this technology available in a form which costs less than a couple billion
dollars per invocation.

Eventually we could choose to replace our biological bodies with
"better" engineered bodies and even before that it can be used to
further expand our life spans. These technologices will interact with
each other synergistically. Technology to enable reverse engineering of
the brain is also expanding at an exponential rate.

You might be interested in reading Roger Penrose's "The Emperor's New
Mind". In it, Penrose convincingly argues that there's "something going
on" in the human brain which current physical theories cannot explain. He
suspects we'll need to develop a unifying theory for quantum-gravity
before we can make further progress in understanding how the mind works.
Penrose has written other books since then -- I believe one of them is
called "Shadows of the Mind" -- but I haven't read them yet, so I'm not
sure if Penrose has since updated his analysis.

Either way, reverse engineering the brain might not be as simple as
sending in nanobots and having them report what they "see". Afterall,
nanobots, by definition, thend to be at the nanometer scale (10^-9
meters), whereas I'm guessing a lot of quantum phenomenon happen at the
plank scale (10^-35 meters). Beyond nanotech, there's picotech, femtotech,
attotech, zeptotech and yoctotech, the last of which only reaches 10^-24
meter scale. If we're going to go this route, we've still got a long way
to go.

Personally, I think current research in neural networks is relatively
promising. Current estimates put the number of neurons in a human brain at
100 billion. There's currently a CPU with 1024 cores
(http://www.technologyreview.com/read_article.aspx?id=17076&ch=infotech).
Once we get a CPU with a billion cores (around 40 years, if we assume a
doubling of core every 18 months), we might start to see something
interesting.

Nanotechnology will greatly speed this up also. This will lead to
machine intelligence on computers that are a million times faster at
processing than our brains.

Note that, depending on your metric, computers may already be a
million times faster at processing than our brains. For one example
metric, communication from one neuron to the text happens using a
combination of chemical and electrical reactions which is exceedingly slow
compared to the switching speed of a transitor in a CPU chip. Advocates of
Strong AI (Penrose is not one of them) believe the only thing stopping
computers from being able to "think like a human" is the relatively linear
nature of CPU design, contrasted against the massively parallel
architecture of the human brain.

[...]

He posulates having interchangable reality and virtual reality and even
having them both at the same time.

Something like http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Computer_mediated_reality
?

I'm fond of the idea that people will be able to one day directly
"perceive" the Internet as a sixth sense, via
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brain_plasticity. Extracting information from
packets using your WiFi connection would be as natural as extracting
information from photons using your eye. This will open up new forms of
artful expression, and a new medium that is not based in sight, sound,
touch, taste or smell. Perhaps you could directly send states of mind,
perspectives or emotions for others to experience.

- Oliver


.

Relevant Pages

  • Re: "true" AI Hardware Development
    ... and other things that "nature built" with the internet and ... many orders of magnitude more complex than a human brain. ... computers will be connected to the Internet". ...
    (comp.ai.philosophy)
  • Re: Leslie Aiellos review of Cunnanes Survival of the Fattest
    ... Survival of the Fattest: The Key to Human Brain Evolution ...
    (sci.anthropology.paleo)
  • Brain activity operate wheelchair???? Change TV channels????
    ... New Technology From Hitachi Controls Electronic Devices by Reading Brain ... you control electronic devices without lifting a finger simply by reading ...
    (alt.support.arthritis)
  • Re: The Future
    ... theory we could stop development of biotechnology, nanotechnology and strong ... not to mention the benefits to peoples lives. ... Historically speaking technology has increased exponentially throuh natural ... In fact some of us are already doing so, for example deep brain stimulation ...
    (comp.lang.cobol)
  • Brain Fingerprinting and the Future of Privacy Rights
    ... legal battles over surveillance technology might take. ... Sketching out a hypothetical situation, Rotenberg imagined, in the ... Americans say it goes too far in restricting people's civil liberties to fight terrorism, while 69 percent are content with it or say it doesn't go far enough), many people may not object to data-mining technology that promises to identify potential terrorists. ... electrochemical signals in the brain. ...
    (sci.psychology.misc)